Enterprise resource planning systems and other sophisticated corporate data processing systems have gained substantial importance in recent years. Specifically, many corporate management theories posit that the success of an organization is directly related to the ability to gather and process enterprise information in an efficient and organized manner. To fulfill these goals, certain software companies have produced information management products. These types of software systems manage enormous amounts of information. Management of inventory levels, customer purchasing information, accounting data, employment information, and various other databases requires significant storage capacity. In addition, e-commerce has placed a premium upon transferring ordinary business operations to electronic work flows, thereby creating further storage capacity requirements. In addition, increased processing speed and capacity places greater demands upon storage resources.
To provide significant storage capacity for information management and other applications, storage area networks (SANs) have been developed. A storage area network typically separates storage capacity from the communication medium utilized in a computer network. For example, client devices and server devices may be communicatively coupled via a communication medium such as a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), and/or the like. The clients may access various applications on the servers to perform organization activities such as accounting, payroll, ordering, and other tasks. The servers may utilize data stored on various storage devices to implement these applications. To avoid unduly taxing the bandwidth of the communication medium utilized for the clients and the servers, another communication medium is utilized for communication between the servers and the storage devices. For example, a Fibre Channel network may be utilized. In such an arrangement, the input/output operations associated with accessing data on storage devices do not impact the clients.
Although this approach does produce performance increases in terms of application efficiency, the arrangement necessarily involves a degree of complexity. In general, the process of structuring and managing a SAN can be quite intensive. For SAN administrators, adding new devices into a heterogeneous storage network typically requires an update/upgrade to the management software to allow the new devices to be discovered and managed by the software, this process can be time consuming and expensive.